But yeah, pretty sure this is just an excuse to get us to revisit an old meme. Somebody set up us.
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Somehow this just highlights the cheapness of the music video. I mean, where the hell are those locations? Close-up at a chainlink fence? Close-up at a white wall? It really looks like some high schooler’s end of term video project.
Somehow, with the grainy version, I just skipped over all that.
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That’s great, because nobody would ever accuse Rick of being any kind of dancer, let’s face it.
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I think it works pretty well upscaled, but it reminds me of all of the issues that surround retrofitting any old media. Some of the artistic choices were made with an eye to the shortcomings of the media. Classic video games often use the blur that was the standard for a CRT to create a better looking image than a modern display provides for the same game. Every item on the set of the original Adams Family show was chosen for the limitations of black and white and I think we can all agree that, despite knowing what the set looked like in other color photos an attempt to capture the true colors would be all wrong.
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I knew It was a rickrolling prank and yet clicked the link.
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I literally just rickrolled myself.
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I love it - a choir singing and seriously bopping along as they sing!
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I don’t care what other people say… Rick Astley, I’m never going to give you up!!!
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No one told the algorithm about pores?
I wounder if they trained it on airbrushed images.
Also, he was young, but I suspect the interpolation makes him look even younger than he would have at native 4K 60 FPS.
Still love the song though.
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COACH: Rick! We need you in there at Defensive tackle!
ASTLEY: No can do coach.
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I’ve been doing some video up-resing using GigaPixel and doing it frame by frame. You do have to be careful of the various settings. I can come up with a good baseline that works for 90% of the video, but sometimes it’ll pick out a part of a face (like mid turn) or a random person in the back ground and then you get all kinds of hilarious effects. I mean it works way better than a standard sinc resize, but AI isn’t quite on the fully automated level yet.
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Glorious
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4k I can handle (although you need a good setup to really start to see the difference between it and 1080p). 60fps nope, that can just go right on out. A higher frame rate is going to mean a higher shutter speed and past a certain point you loose motion blur. When I turn my head or something moves past my field of vision it is not a perfectly crisp picture. There are plenty of places in movies and TV where having that crispness isn’t a bad thing, but I think it looks unnatural in most settings.
I also don’t know why people think up resing to 4k from what is probably a 480 or 576 source is going to be the same as native 4k. I think it looks better, but you’ll never get the refined sharpness of a modern 4k camera. Going to HD would have been a slightly better choice IMHO, the expectation is just lower. Ok, maybe not never, but not for several more decades at best. Are we going to be showing the Rick Roll to our grand kids in AI up res to 16k?
Choir Choir Choir does great stuff! They did Overkill with Colin Hay!
And here is 1500 people singing Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah with Rufus Wainwright!
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You need to listen to more contemporary r&b. It’s very different. Still ghastly, of course, but what the young people listen to is not anything like the charts in 1980.
He was only 21 when the original 1987 video happened, so it’s not surprising that upscaling lets us all see just how young he looked at the time.
As far as the music of young people sounding like what music did in the 80’s, in my anecdotal experience that’s mostly not true. There are definitely places where that is true, such as with synthpop-esque acts like The Midnight or Timecop1983, but I feel like it’s kind of intentional in those cases. A few Erza Furman songs also sound like they could have been recorded back then as well, I suppose.
But things continue to evolve in new directions, helped in no small part by vastly improving tech.
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I think maybe I have an odd, generational reaction to these type upscales, and modern video in general. The only way I know how to describe it is through national vs local commercials. Like, you’re watching a big network tv show with their commercials, then your local channel breaks in with the lower budget commercials.
The national network commercials always looked more like film, professional, and the local looked like they were made with a standard video camera any of us had. That’s how this feels to me. To me, the upscaled version looks high school AV club. The crispness and such seems to make it LESS professional looking to me.
I get the same feeling with a lot of modern, industry standard video now. There’s some sort of weird psychological bias at work.
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The official upload is 25fps, which suggests that the source material is PAL video.
Turning up the brightness is one of the things that makes the interpolated version look like cheap TV. Feature films can look like daytime soaps after an excessively bright digital transfer.
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It’s during those moments when you can tell they’re really lizard people.
